Midnight Sun Mining reports major expansion of Dumbwa copper system in Zambia

And uh we made that discovery one year ago. So it's been a busy year. We've done an immense amount of drilling. um and we have this brand new deposit to talk about and and there's lots of uh lots of detail to go over.

All right, welcome back inside our proactive news room and joining me now is Adrian O'Brien. He is the vice president of business development for Midnight Sun mining Corp. and Adrian, great to see you again. How are you?

Always great, Steve. doing really well. busy times and uh lots to talk about.

Absolutely. Well, you've had some really strong uh drill results and we'll talk about that. But let's remind everyone a little bit about the operation you have in Zambia and the work that's ongoing here right now.

For sure. So we're sitting in what they call the Dome region of Zambia. This is the northernmost part of the copper belt and basically the simplest way to describe it, the five biggest copper mines, the five biggest copper deposits on the African continent completely surround us. So we have a brand new discovery. um as of this news release, it's now 12 kilometers long of mineralized strike. and uh we made that discovery one year ago. So it's been a busy year. We've done an immense amount of drilling. um and we have this brand new deposit to talk about and and there's lots of uh lots of detail to go over.

Yeah, so you've extended the uh a minorization some 2400 m. So this is obviously very, very successful.

Yeah. Yeah. So, look, we're, you know, when we started this program, we started at the very south boundary of our property, and we did this to be systematic. The idea was, let's drill this deposit, you know, we want to define it as quickly as possible. So, we raised $30 million, we launched a program, and we drilled a hole every 50 m across the deposit and every 100 m north to south over the course of the last year, and uh we just reached the 12 kilometer mark. So, you know, if you think about that, it's almost 100,000 meters of drilling in 12 months, which is almost unheard of.

Yeah. Uh the in the news release, you talk about where you're finding the mineralization and a great deal of it is is from surface. So talk to me a bit about what you're seeing there.

For sure. So one of the things that makes this district so unique isn't just the um, you know, geological uh size or constraint of these deposits. These are billion ton deposits typically that surround us. Um you look at Lana next door, Barrack's flagship is 1.6 billion tons. Um these are giant deposits, make no mistake. But they sit right at surface and that's what makes them so unique. So these are, you know, basement dome hosted or sediment hosted deposits and, you know, not to dive too deep into geology, the simple thing to understand is these unlike deposits in Chile, Panama, Argentina, Arizona, you name it, they sit basically at sea level and they are right at your feet, they're at surface. So, um obviously that that adds to some pretty amazing economics for those mines.

Now, I know you're still waiting for assay results to come back and there's been some some delays in that. So there's still lots more to come and lots more to report from from this. But I'm just wondering, um are you already in the planning stages for where you want to go next? Because as you mentioned, this is a large area. You've got a lot of things to look at and and you seem to be going in the in the right direction as you said, but there's so much more to see.

Absolutely. So the the sort of the way that we attacked this was by splitting this target into two halves. So, you know, the target itself was based on soil sampling that was done over multiple generations, thousands, tens of thousands in fact of samples um that defined the target. And the target's 20 kilometers long. So there's your first hurdle, right? This thing is 20 kilometers long. How do you attack it? So what we did is we split it in half, we drilled off the first half. That's what we've just finished now. Um so we call that our phase one exploration program and the idea was get an incredible bulletproof data set from phase one that we could apply to phase two so that phase two could be more targeted, um you know, focused on the areas that we believe have the highest quality mineralization or the best chance um to have really good mineralization. And so we now understand what Du is, we understand how it sits. Um you kind of have this narrow corridor if you will that ranges from three or 400 m to, you know, in some cases five or 600 m wide and running from surface to about 200 m depth but wide open at depth. We've just never gone deeper. um and extending to 12 kilometers and of course the um you know, all of the geophysical interpretation, all of the sampling that we have tells us that this goes on for for the next 9 kilometers. So this phase two, which is actually already underway, um you know, it's not about uh stopping and and, you know, really needing to take a lot of time to interpret what we've done. It's really just rolling into that next phase and attacking this target, uh you know, for that next 9 kilometers a little differently. And so we have a few different goals in this in this part of the program. This next phase, you know, we know now what Dumba looks like. The most exciting part of the news release that came out uh yesterday is that we're into an area now between kind of the 10 and and 12 kilometer mark where this system goes from, you know, two to 400, maybe up to 600 m wide or probably four to 600 on average to 2.4 kilometers. Now, just based on that geometry alone, you can imagine what that could do to the size of a of a deposit. So we're into this much wider area, the mineralization is more coherent, it's more consistent, it's thicker, um we're getting great visuals, but now we need to see what those essays hold and move to the next phase and the next phase is test everything east and west, continue on 9 kilometers north, and finally, let's go underneath that 200 m depth and see what sits below.

All right. Well, lots to come. It sounds like it's going to be a busy time. Uh good to have you back, Adrian, really appreciate the time. uh and we'll uh we'll have you back very soon because I imagine there's going to be a lot more news flow over the next few months.

It will, that's the goal.

All right, good stuff. There's Adrian O'Brien, the Vice President of Business Development for Midnight Sun Mining.